Pardon?

I bet that rings bells all over the place and in most cases we can read the message but what does it mean? Very often it's not an error message, but it's still something that has to be figured out.

Quite a lot of my time is devoted to helping people in this very situation and that includes me sitting here scratching my own head. I was reminded the other day of this happening when somebody became very confused when opening a browser.

"Internet Explorer is not currently your default browser. Would you like to make it your default browser?

[Always perform this check when starting Internet Explorer]"

I've used IE as the example here but an almost identical message applies to Netscape Navigator / Communicator or any of the other browsers.

There's quite a technical reason for this question but it's not difficult to grasp the basic situation. In fact, if you only ever use one browser and never plan to install another in the future you can skip the rest of the story... unless you're curious.

The technical bit is that this is all to do with what are called "file type associations." Computer files come in all shapes and sizes but they all have to be of one type or another and this is identified by the last bit of the file name (.exe .txt .dll .doc .htm). One of the things determined by the file type is which program, or type of program, opens that particular file or document.

In this case we're talking about .htm or .html files which almost always have to be opened by a browser program. Which browser isn't really important but needless to say the browser companies want you to use theirs and this explains the question being asked above. They want to mark every one of this type of file on your system to be opened by their browser and nobody elses. This is why they want their browser set as the default.

There are other ways of marking or associating these files to a particular program within Windows itself but it can be very tricky.

My advice if you regularly switch between various browsers is to always answer no to the question but leave the option unchecked as to whether you want to be asked the question again when opening the browser next time. It only takes a second to deal with the question once you understand what it's all about.

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